Beauty and Pleasure, Time and Disillusion

Handel's startlingly adult boyhood comes to fruition in Part II, in a
sequence of duets and a consummatory quartet between the four protagonists,
in which the women shilly-shally, as do we all, being reluctant to admit
that we live in a vale of tears that might, if we could let it, offer salvation.
Perhaps only tears can redeem our 'mondo insano'; in any case Handel, young
as he was, awards the palm, commonsensically rather than prissily, to Time
and Disillusion, the climax coming in Pleasure's double aria, Lascia
la Spina. This is first sung as an aria dangerously precarious and slightly
frantic: only to be repeated in a slow setting to the tune of the famous
sarabande from the opera Almira, originally written when the composer
was a mere 19. In this new theatrical context the noble melody, supported
by solemn wind instruments, is sublime enough to bear the gravity of the
paradoxical human predicament, becoming an altar-dance which may be presumed
to entail both sex and sanctity: though some may think that the very slow
tempo Joachim Carlos Martini adopts with the Barock-orchester Frankfurt
is slightly excessive, since it discourages the physicality of even a potentially
holy sarabande. Still, the orchestral playing usually has the necessary
equilibrium between majesty and vivacity: as becomes patent in Pleasure's
consummatory aria, Come Nembo che fugge, which comes close to resolving
the paradox of our existence since, having no need of Bach's death-haunted
mysticism, it generates a potent tragic energy from its very ambiguity
between life and death. Beauty's final aria, at last submitting to 'Heaven's
Minister Elect', evades spiritual sanctions yet gets the best of both worlds
in being grandly spacious, with plangent oboe obbligato to render incarnate
human distress, while also being rationally measured ('Largo e staccato'),
as the Young Composer plays the Wise Old Man.

This performance inserts, between this climacteric aria and the Final
Chorus, an organ concerto (No 4 from opus 4, in F major): as had become
Handel's custom by the time, thirty years after the oratorio's pristine
Roman appearance, he made his 'definitive' revision in 1737. The insertion
of an organ concerto had a symbolic appositeness, since the organ of Handel's
day was a 'box of pipes' scientifically tuned by proud Man to create a god-like
concordance. That Handel himself officiated as soloist at the organ affirmed
his identity as Maker and Master, a human being with overtly god-like faculties.
No wonder he recognised the worth and the centrality of this music of his
shining youth; and even made a second revised version, to an English text,
in the penultimate year of his life. Today, after a span of almost three
hundred years, the young music still shines in glory undimmed.